Dr. Bob Gant/Special to the News Sentinel
Morristown-Hamblen High School East senior John Hale and sophomore Sydney Burchell prepare to weigh one of the channel catfish they raised on pellets created from processed moonshine waste in the aquaculture facility they designed and constructed as part of their SASEF research efforts.

Matthew Perkins/Special to the News Sentinel
Oak Ridge High School senior Tyler Hatch boils severed deer heads on a stove with a fume hood for his and research partner Russell Fulcher's SASEF research project.

April Nieuwkoop

Morristown-Hamblen High School East senior John Hale has been thinking a lot lately about moonshine. And mushrooms.

Hale, lead researcher working with sophomore Sydney Burchell under the guidance of science teacher Dr. Bob Gant, has worked the past year on a waste management and fish food production project involving moonshine and mushrooms for one of Dr. Gant's classes. The resultant "Filamentous Fungi Cultivation on ‘Moonshine' Distillate Residues and Thin Stillage to Produce Reusable Water and a High-value Fish Food Co-Product" project is one of more than 300 hundred entered in the 2013 Southern Appalachian Science and Engineering Fair (SASEF) that began April 1 and runs through April 4 at the University of Tennessee's Thompson-Boling Arena.

The SASEF competition has two divisions. The Junior Division is for middle school students grades 6-8 and the Senior Division is for high school students grades 912. The top two Senior Division students will win an expense-paid trip to compete in the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (Intel ISEF), billed as the world's largest international pre-college science competition, which is being held in Phoenix, Ariz., May 1217.

The Upper East Tennessee service area of Intel ISEF's Southern Appalachian region encompasses 23 counties including Knox County, contiguous counties and others. More than 1,500 high school students from approximately 70 locales around the world demonstrate their independent research projects in structured annual competitions through Intel ISEF.

"Dr. Gant came up with the idea of working with the moonshine waste produced at Ole Smoky Moonshine Distillery a couple of years ago," said Hale. "I came up with the idea last year of using the fungus for fish food. There are a lot of catfish farms in the area."

The moonshine waste products are the spent corn (or other grain) mash left over from the fermentation and distillation process, called stillage, along with the fluids used to clean the brewing vats in between fermentations.

"I did a little research on fungus and found out it was able to process water and nutrients from water through a liquid culture," explained Hale. "That struck my fancy because if you can process moonshine stillage to a greater degree then distillers can possibly reuse the liquids. So the distillery would have virtually no waste. And you can take the solids, including the mushrooms we were using to process the stillage, and turn it into fish food."

Hale credits research partner Sydney Burchell with bringing a great deal of imaginative thinking to the project and coming up with unusual and effective ways to approach various aspects of it.

"I'm happy to come back to SASEF this year," said Hale. "It's a big deal."

Like Hale and Burchell, Oak Ridge High School students and SASEF entrants Tyler Hatch and Russell Fulcher are working with an element familiar in these parts — deer. Specifically, deer heads.

"Essentially what I did was get two deer heads (from a taxidermist) severed at the first vertebrae, hung one of them up in the woods with a milk crate about three feet off the ground, and put the other one on the ground, and compared the different rates of decomposition, the time of day different insects arrived, and so on and so forth," explained ORHS senior and lead researcher Tyler Hatch.

The results of the project, titled "Decomposition of a Hanging Head versus the Decomposition of a Head on the Ground During Winter in Tennessee," indicate that the deer heads on the ground decomposed faster and almost all insect "events" happened considerably sooner.

Dr. Matthew Perkins, teacher in the Science Department at ORHS and first-time teacher for the Experimental Scientific Research class, said he's proud that Tyler and Russell had the opportunity to pursue their own research and their own ideas.

"This was primarily an exercise in forensic observation for Tyler and Russell," noted Dr. Perkins.

One of this year's SASEF Junior Division competitors is 14-year-old April Nieuwkoop, an eighth-grader at Halls Middle School. Her project, titled "Traumatized Teeth," for Andrea Souza's honors science class tested the effects of three liquids — water, milk and Mountain Dew — on baby teeth. (The teeth were donated by April's little sister.)

"I kept them in the liquid for seven weeks," said Nieuwkoop. "The water didn't really do anything to the tooth. The milk dulled the color on the tooth and made little cracks on the surface but nothing too bad. The Mountain Dew tooth started to rot and turn yellow. The inside turned yellow and the outside turned, like, a plastic-y white color. Then the top layer started to peel away and flake off and kind of eroded."

SASEF Junior Division entrants, unlike those in the Senior Division, have to have been placed in the top 20 percent of a school or county evaluation to qualify for the science and engineering fair. April Nieuwkoop's "Traumatized Teeth" took first place in the biological science category of the Hall's Middle School evaluation.